Escapist & Reclaimist Media

You can only get so far away...

Escapism is a lie. You can’t get away from yourself. You can think about something else, but you’re always going to think about it your way; and so you will always face the challenge of reconciling your way of thinking with the way that everything outside of you operates. 

Data tells us that almost nobody can handle sensory deprivation–and that most people can’t even deal with meditation. Being alone without sensory input is actively stressful; people need to be able to contextualize themselves as a part of a larger system in order to understand that they even exist at all.

What makes fantasy and video games so exciting to the human brain is not that they let us escape from reality, so much as that they let us travel to a specific space in the communication gestalt, and to build another world there which sort of lays on top of ours in an extra-dimensional conceptual layer. These realities usually have clear rules: systems that play on the functions of our senses in order to create new systems of logic. That logic has to be heavily debated for the conceptual “world” to feel similarly to different people; and the more that anyone’s logic is individually investigated, the more apparent it becomes that no two people are ever really in the same conceptual “world” at all.